Meeting_2005-10-31

Meeting setup

Date: 31.10.2005
Time: 10.00 Norw. time
Place: Wherever we are : -)
Tools: iChat, SubEthaEdit, phone

Agenda

Opening, agenda review
Reviewing the task list from two weeks ago
Documentation - divvun.no
Corpus gathering
Corpus infrastructure
Linguistics
Speller infrastructure
Other issues
Summary, task lists
Closing

1. Opening, agenda review, participants

Opened at 10: 05.

Present: Børre, Maaren, Sjur, Thomas, Tomi, Trond

Absent: Saara

Main secretary: Tomi

Agenda accepted as is.

2. Reviewing the task list from the last meeting

Børre

Contact oahpahusossodat and the rest of the SD about texts
- Get help from the Tromsø department of Sámediggi to dig in WebSak
  - Done, and picked up some texts
Gather public texts
- From the Sámediggi
Reorganise the directory structure
- Put all corpus texts into one place
  - Done
- Continue converting text from input format to our xml
  - Not done
Ask Thor-Øivind to move bugzilla to our new webserver.
- He has been very busy, and since bugzilla seems to work ok, he has scheduled the update for next week.

Maaren

The missing list, both the overall missing list from our xml corpus, and a file-for-file review, in order to get different terminology.
- Not done
continue working with the missing list from risten.no
- Not done
Start working on Sámi place names
- Not done
Start working at normativity issues (numeral issues with Trond?)
- Not done, sorry

Saara

Look at the corpus infrastructure issue
Look at the corpus interface issue with Lars
make an emacs mode for the name project (cf. specs in the memo above)
- Done
Plan a conversion script for the name lexicon.
- Not done, discussed with Tomi about using his c++ code in xml2lexc script.

Sjur

Lule Sámi twol problems, look again at the sets definition with Thomas and Trond
- Not done
risten.no bugs and fixes
- installed the latest eXist snapshot, and tested it
- corrected several conformity bugs that had been accepted by earlier snapshots
discuss risten.no work with Tomi
- Not done
follow up on voice group-chat not working to Sámediggi
- Test Marratech
project planning with Trond, continued
- also look at the development processes - specification and testing
Follow up on place names from Norge Digitalt -> remind Bjørn Olav Megard
- He is reminded, but no response so far. Needs more action.
Evaluate SFST as speller (and analyzer) lexicon
- more thorough analysis than was possible in Guovdageaidnu
write a background document on the corpus contracts
- Not done
Discuss the contract issue with Trond, return the new version to the lawyer
- Call Kimmo Koskenniemi for comments
  - no answer so far
write to the Giellalávdegoddi once more, emphasizing timetable and response needs in the Divvun project
- wrote draft letter and sent it to Maaren for QA and translation
discuss kvensk project support with Trond
- Not done
write public tender documents
- Nothing last week
other tasks:
- finally corrected the Forrest config for XXE to be fully installable independent of the application itself. This will make it much easier to install upgrades of XXE, and also to upgrade the config itself, which is important to help the old GIO take control of the risten.no development.
- The new config is available from me
- you should all update to XXE 3.0: -)
buy:
- rucksacks
  - ordered: Professional 17 Backpack Case by Brenthaven
- new computer (project server)?
- project management software
- OmniOutline (upgrade)
- OmniGraffle (upgrade)
- ISDN card for Maaren (Maaren will order herself)

Thomas

work on Lule Sami compounding and derivation
- finished (this calls for at least a virtual celebration !!)
Look at Linguistic bugs with Trond
Meet with Sjur and Trond about the definition of G1, G2, G3
- not done

Tomi

Aspell: Continue working on the affix file & aspell
- Contact aspell author (UTF-8 thing)
  - Not done
three-part compounding
- Not done
corpus infrastructure: dtd location (both public and internal)
- Not done
corpus infrastructure: file and dir organisation
- Done
Document aspell and corpus infrastructure
- Partially done
Cgi-script for uploading documents to corpus base
- Done, but needs modifications?
Specification for new catxml in C++
- this includes also placing the source and binary
  - Not done
  - clean the script/ catalogue with Trond
Common makefile issues
- Not done
discuss risten.no work with Sjur
- Not done

Trond

Work on the bug list (7 open).
- Still 7 open, as the number project hasn't started.
- Started looking at the G3 definition issue for sme, it is the key to some of the bugs, and responsible for very many of the missing words.
project planning with Sjur, continued
also look at the development processes - specification and testing
- Not done.
Work on the name project:
- Introduce the +Mal, +Fem, ... tags to the parser
- Done. Now the tags are there, and in the multichar list. We may thus start writing rules for them in the sme-dis.rle file.
- and discuss the work with Maaren and Børre.
- Not done. Hopefully
clean the script/ dir
- Down from 76 to 51 entities.
discuss kvensk project support with Sjur
- Hmm, did we discuss this issue?
Otherwise, the week was dominated by going to a conference on minority languages and language technology, in Bozen.

3. Documentation

Documentation tasks:

Add documentation on our corpus infrastructure and our corpus work in general ("To be done by the ones making the corpora": Børre, Tomi, Trond, Saara).
Now we have 4 documents:
1. Correct corpus (disamb usage)
2. Corpus plan (for the disamb corpus cwb)
3. catxml

For the basic corpora, we need 3 types of documentation, or doc for 3 target groups:

For the users/linguists: What corpus are found, how do I use them (this info is now scattered)
For the collectors: How do I add texts, where do I add them, how do I convert them (this is the Corpus conversion doc)
For the programmer: What did I actually do? (this is partly the catxml doc)

For the work on the graphical user interface, we need documentation as well, in principle along the same lines, except that the user is not the same linguist as above.

add/update Aspell documentation (Tomi)
- Some documentation has been written, but there still is work to be done.
as always: document what you're doing: -) (all)

4. Corpus gathering

Governmental documents (earlier in pdf, now in html)

Tasks:

move existing gov. documents (pdf) from gt/ to our corpus repository (Børre)
- There are appr. 10 non-broken pdf documents in gt/sme/corp/original/ (the ones named stmelXXX.pdf contain only one page each)
Collect public (pdf and html) files (Børre)
- Done some test downloading, will have to look at tools to do this automatically.

Contracts

Tasks:

Follow-up on the lawyers' comments (Trond has started with the university)
- Trond and Sjur finished the next revision of the contracts, and are waiting for comments from Kimmo Koskenniemi
  - Update: No comments from Kimmo yet
add a background document explaining the model (Sjur)

The most problematic issue:

Who has the copyright of extracted material, like single words, collections of words, syntactic structure (potentially with some words filled in)? We need this to be controlled by us, not by the authors. The exact borderline is hard to define.

North Sámi New Testament

Our inhouse sme nt is as new as the one they have at Bibelselskapet, and we were told we could just use the version we have ourselves.

Lule Sámi New Testament

Svenska Bibelsällskapet is putting their finishing touches to the Lule Sámi translation, we will have it soon.

Haven´t heard anything from Olavi Korhonen. The only problem with our version is that there are some run together strings, and we could solve it ourselves.

Lule Sámi Dictionary

Nothing new about the meeting with Anders Kintel.

5. Corpus infrastructure

Updated task list:

Make a system for file and directory permission (today: we all belong to the cvs group), to only allow people with root user privileges write access to the corpus repository, at least regarding original files
Include the xsl files under version control (cvs? rcs?)
Incorporate language detection as part of the corpus processing.
we need a way to deal with hyphenated documents in catxml/preprocess:
1. in normal cases hyphenation points should be removed
2. when testing the robustness of our parsers, as well as when testing the hyphenator, the hyphenation points should be retained

6. Linguistics

Name lexicon

Summary: see the newsgroup

Unclassified:
6090 entries

3203 LONDON
1788 BERN
 468 NYSTØ
 330 ACCRA
  80 MARJA
  59 NIILLAS
  43 ANAR
  43 ALEUHTAT
  20 GIEDDI
  17 HEANDARAT
  16 DUORTNUS
   7 SULLOT
   4 VARGGAT
   4 GEAVNNIS
   3 EATNAMAT
   2 NYOBL
   2 GUOLBBA
   1 PIERA

Motivation:

Divvun: We want to cross-link different versions of the same locations in different languages
Common: We do not want to enter the same names twice. We want a language-independent name lexicon
Disamb: Having a richer tag set makes it easier to disambiguate
Future: Richer analysis makes new applications possible, within information retrieval, grammar checking, machine translation etc.

Needed: A plan for this project:

do the main markup in the present propernoun file
make a script for converting it to xml (to be done one time)
make a script for xml2lexc (to be done by the makefile)
1. There is a sample file for the xml file format in gt/common/src/proper-nouns.xml
2. There is a working xml2lexc for Komi, written by Saara
make the tags etc. in the parser

Conversion:

Mark up the remaining 6090 entires until conversion starts (Maaren to do the Sámi names, Ilona to look at C-FI-NEN and other Finnish names, Trond, Thomas and Børre to look at the rest)
Entries still to be done: see above
This means we would need a seventh option, the unspecified name.
Then split propernoun-sme-lex.txt into two, one with the sami name being generated by the xml2lexc script, and one manually written file, containing the name sublexica (called propernoun-sme-morph.txt or whatever)
Look into efficient editing of the XML lexicon (Tomi, Saara)
Then convert to xml (Tomi, Saara)
Look into efficient editing of the XML lexicon again (Tomi, Saara)
Look into synchronisation issues with risten.no - we want the names there as well (Tomi)
1. Consider automatic sorting on commit

Twol SETS definition issue

The definition of G1, G2, G3 in Lule Sámi is still open. and we would like to have input on this issue. We need a G3 definition for North Sámi also.

Update: it is still not working, see bug 193

SUGGESTION (Trond): Thomas, Trond and Sjur didn't meet last week either and should try again this Wednesday instead.

North Sámi

three-part compounds issue still open
number project still open
The treatment of Sámi place names, we need a contract with "Norge digitalt", via UFD.
- Sjur has written an e-mail to the UFD contact person, Øystein Johannessen, who will look into it soon. He has not responded beyond saying he will return to it. Sjur brought this up in the board meeting, and Bjørn Olav Megard will remind Øystein Johannessen about this issue. Sjur will follow up on this one.
normativity issues:
- the Giellalávdegoddi meeting was last Friday, they will have a new meeting in December. They were not able to make any decisions, and there will be a new Giellalávdegoddi beginning next year who won't make decisions until late spring. This is a serious problem for the Divvun problem.
  - Actions: Sjur will bring this to the Divvun board, write a new letter to the Giellalávdegoddi, emphasizing the needs and timetables of the project
- The document with the list of open issues needs updating, both regarding the status of each issue, and documentation of them. Also a better classification of the issues would be nice.

Lule Sámi

Sjur, Thomas and Trond will cont. Lule Sámi issues.

Numerals

The issue is postponed to next week.

An empirical overview
1. Numeral generation
2. Numeral inflection
3. Numerals as parts of compounds
A clear concept of how we want to treat them
1. Tagging
A treatment

We will return to this issue after the name conversion.

7. Speller infrastructure

Nothing this week either.

8. Other

Technical issues

The mac os / perl bug (at least Trond and Sjur has it):
- utf8 "\xC4" does not map to Unicode at /Users/trond/gt/script/preprocess line 82. This msg did not show up in 10.3 (perl 5.8.1), but does so in 10.4 (perl 5.8.6). It is probably a perl - OS mismatch. (Trond, Thor Øivind, Tomi)
  - Another example of the same bug:
  - : "\x{00c3}" does not map to utf8 at ../script/preprocess line 113, <> chunk 33.
  - One way to "resolve" this is to redirect the error messages to /dev/null:

... | preprocess 2> /dev/null | lookup ...

Video conferencing across firewalls

The problem we've had with the SD firewall persists, and there doesn't seem to be any resources available to help us. Geir Kaaby instead suggested we look at the Marratech package, and try it out. So please download the MacOS X client (or get it from me), and I'll send you the URL to the meeting room as soon as I get it.

Bug fixing

19 open bugs (and 24 risten.no bugs)

Bugzilla update

When Bugzilla is being moved, it should also be updated to the newest version, and the UTF-8 bug should be resolved.

Buying

rucksacks for the whole Divvun team

risten.no

Organisation: could Tomi be used, in exchange for more linguistic work by (old) GIO members? Yes, it is ok, but how much still needs to be evaluated
it is ok to integrate "kvensk" placenames with risten.no
- this should be integrated with the general proper name work - we want all proper names integrated with risten.no, df above
- needs further development of risten.no to allow for multiple XML bases to be presented and maintained in parallel. This is to be further worked on by Tomi and Sjur

Project planning and development processes

Trond is using his project as a test case for an IT guy, Geir Tore Voktor, who is taking a course in project management. Be prepared to answer questions.

Conference report from Trond

Relevant themes on the conference for us:
- Terminology work
- Dictionary work between minority languages
- Repositories for minority language resources
- Disambiguation work, for South African languages

Also, our work is relevant to other projects. This

There is welsh work on terminology:
- ( Dewi Jones, Delyth Prys, U Wales, Bangor, I couldn't find). They use ISO standards for terminological work, the ones of us interested in risten.no should have a look.

9. Summary, task list